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Now we know that Mississippi has the greatest percentage of fat Americans. (How we know that is unclear: Wednesday’s story doesn’t say.) How does the government count fat people?

Politically, the question is whether the percentage of fat people, or whether you're fat or not, is any of the government’s business. The group that trumpeted the study, Trust for America’s Health, thinks it is. It wants government to manage our fatness and fitness by such things as steering development away from suburbs and toward compact cities, on the theory that people in town walk more. I think that’s a reach. I agree with the Cato Institute, which says it’s none of the government’s business how much people walk, or exercise, or how many plates of pasta they eat. We need the Centers for Disease Control to protect us from the Ebola virus, not from pizza.